It’s hard to grow lots of food in dry environments. Climate change will ensure that it gets harder still. As average temperatures rise globally, scientists say longer and harsher droughts will follow, threatening the livelihoods of dryland farmers and challenging food security for millions of people.
New innovations will be required to help these smallholder farmers stay one step ahead of global warming. More than 50 years ago, agricultural scientists, governments, and philanthropic foundations mobilized to establish a special research center devoted to helping the world grow more food in arid climates. That center’s work continues to this day, but it needs help. Here we’d like to introduce you to one of our prospective partners.
Meet ICRISAT
In 1971, an alliance of governments and private foundations, including the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, set up the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research, today known as CGIAR or the CG System. CGIAR was charged with continuing the successful work of Norman Borlaug, the wheat breeder and Nobel Peace Laureate who spawned the Green Revolution. One year later, CGIAR and the government of India joined forces to create the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics or ICRISAT.
The “foundation stone” for ICRISAT’s headquarters in Hyderabad was laid by India’s prime minister in 1975. In addition to its main campus, ICRISAT also maintains offices in New Delhi and at strategic locations across Africa. ICRISAT’s mission is “developing and improving dryland farming and agri-food systems to address the challenges of hunger, malnutrition, poverty, and environmental degradation affecting the 2.1 billion people residing in the drylands of Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and beyond,” as it explains in an overview.
ICRISAT’s research focuses on developing varieties of popular dryland crops that can deliver higher yields in lower water conditions. This means developing crop varieties that can withstand droughts, a critical element in adapting farming to global warming. But the Institute’s efforts go way beyond that.
The crop varieties ICRISAT develops and disseminates must also be resilient to common crop diseases and pests. Food production in India and parts of Africa has kept up with population growth in no small part thanks to ICRISAT’s work. Sorghum and millets are just a few of the crops ICRISAT scientists work on.
50 years later, the organization celebrates the many milestones it has achieved.
ICRISAT’s first improved varieties of pearl millet and sorghum were introduced to Sudan in 1985. This work resulted in better crop yields for Sudanese sorghum and pearl millet farmers.
In 1991, it introduced higher-yielding pearl millet to farmers in Namibia, a famously arid part of sub-Saharan Africa. More food for smallholder farmers followed. ICRISAT’s researchers were just warming up.
By 1996, they had gifted to the world a faster-maturing variety of groundnut, more commonly known as the peanut. ICRISAT later gave smallholder farmers in India improved varieties of pigeon pea, what the organization describes as “the world’s first commercial pigeon pea hybrid.”
Research at ICRISAT has grown more sophisticated as the years have passed.
Genome splicing
Today, ICRISAT’s work goes deep—researchers there are increasingly curious about what it is in these crops’ very DNA that makes them ideally suited for growing in arid regions, especially millets, considered one of the world’s most climate-resilient class of crops.
A breakthrough came in 2011 when ICRISAT announced that it had successfully mapped the entire pigeon pea genome. That work made it possible for scientists to identify more than 48,000 individual pigeon pea genes. The entire genome for groundnut was mapped in 2016. ICRISAT also spearheaded a project that resulted in the successful sequencing of the pearl millet genome in 2017. It even decoded the chickpea genome.
ICRISAT was awarded the Africa Food Prize in 2021 in part for its work on sequencing crops’ DNA.
Critically important work
ICRISAT is fully aware of the importance of its work and the gravity of the situation facing smallholder farmers growing food in arid regions, areas that “exhibit some of the most unforgiving and harshest conditions to be found anywhere on the planet” as the organization notes in a video. The vast majority of people living in these areas rely on farming for their livelihoods, it adds, with more than 750 million of them living in abject poverty.
“Crops on which these regions depend for food security are constantly beset by changing climates, extreme weather events such as droughts, to nutrient-depleted soils, and environmental degradation,” ICRISAT says.
Then there are the other challenges these farmers face. Poor transportation infrastructure can make it difficult or impossible to deliver their harvests to markets. Wars can break out, making it impossible to grow food as farmers flee for their lives or lose access to supply chains. And they may see little to no support from their governments and development agencies that have for too long been mainly focused on industrial projects, bypassing agriculture.
Faced with a rising world population, increasingly erratic weather, and governments distracted by other needs, ICRISAT knows that it alone can’t help dryland smallholder farmers keep ahead of climate change. That’s why the Institute has been partnering with other like-minded institutions, like HarvestPlus.
Grow Further is now proud to count itself as among ICRISAT’s newest allies in this ongoing battle for better food security and nutrition in the arid parts of the world. Grow Further brings individual donors to the table for the first time but is pleased to partner with other players and work together to achieve a more food-secure future.
— Grow Further
Photo credit: Officials tour ICRISAT’s RS Paroda Genebank. ICRISAT/Creative Commons (CC BY-NC 2.0).
